The Dallas-based Uptown Agency has launched a new campaign for a partnership that reads like a love letter to the golden age of travel: SafariScapes and Pan Am, together on a private jet journey across Africa.
SafariScapes brought in The Uptown Agency to build the creative platform for the partnership. The assignment was to make a safari operator with a decade of trips behind it stand comfortably beside one of the most recognized names in travel history.
The direction started with one idea: Pan Am is not just an airline that used to exist. It is a story about adventure and discovery. Uptown built the campaign on that heritage rather than using it as set dressing.
The result is a platform grounded in travel poster art, the mid-century illustration style that once made a destination feel like a promise. Every piece was illustrated from real photographs in the SafariScapes archive, a decade of images shot on the ground across the continent. Rendered as poster art by Head of Design Charlie Salas, the form does something a photograph cannot: it hands you the memory of a trip you haven’t taken yet.
For SafariScapes Director Nick Lamon, the connection was a natural one. “The Pan Am ‘meatball’ represents the most romantic era in the history of travel, and an African safari deserves nothing less,” he said. “We didn’t want the creative to feel like an ad for a trip. We wanted it to feel like a poster you would have torn out of a magazine in 1968 and kept.”
The work spans brand and creative platform, content and production, and full-funnel paid media, carrying the poster language across every touchpoint from key art to the booking experience.
